The damage to people and the cost of the limited reach of mental and emotional health care in America is staggering. One in four students leaves college prior to their junior year due to such problems, yet the SAT test confirms that these students have the scholastic aptitude to handle college-level coursework. Fifty percent of college students will either drop out before getting their degree or take much longer to complete their college education. Yet all of these young adults passed an entrance exam attesting to their intellectual capacity to perform the work.
Twenty-six million American workers have a chemical dependency problem yet after 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives. For what? Drug use is rampant and violence associated therewith is even more brutal and widespread.
Each year, Americans spend more than $90 billion on alcohol. The U.S. Department of Labor has estimated that substance abuse costs American businesses more than $100 billion/year. The divorce rate in America for first marriage is 41%; 60% for second marriages, and 73% for a third marriage in America.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Bureau, during 2007-2009, mental health services were needed, but not received, by about 11.3 million adults annually (on average), corresponding to 5 percent of adults in the United States. The reasons included: cost or lack of adequate insurance coverage (49.5%), a fear of stigma (21.8%), and lack of accessibility to services (14.8%).
In the past, there was no universal rating system to measure emotional and mental health capabilities for successfully taking a life step. Therapists or mental health care practitioners may be able to gauge a patient's readiness for college or marriage but the statistics point out that most people do not seek out these professionals until there is a life problem. Thus, there is a need for an easily accessible system and method to help users to identify mental and emotional deficits before the user's life is seriously impacted.
A need also exists for a more affordable and efficient system and method to bring affordable mental and emotional health care to anyone that has Internet access or a cell phone. There is also a need for a cost effective and efficient way to bring practical life skills training and emotional and mental health care knowledge currently residing in self-help books, tapes, and other physical media to any person via online methods. There is also a need for an interactive means of using such knowledge to teach and treat individuals with emotional and/or mental problems.
Additionally there is a need to provide training to such individuals in soft skills such as relationship skills, appropriate attitude towards risk/reward for the desired life stage or life goal, and self-management techniques so that individuals may learn to set goals for their lives, take concrete steps to meet those goals, and access a breadth of interactive therapeutic routines covering a variety of emotional and mental health and life skills needs that uses limited mental health jargon and speaks to the user as a friend or mentor would.